20 Ingenious Apache ”Weapons”‘ That Outsmarted the U.S. Army!

PART 2:

 On the back were two loops. The warrior ran his left arm through both and held it between himself and whatever was coming. Tough enough to turn an arrow. No forge produced it.  No foundry, no contract, no railhead. A bull, a knife, and a few hours of one man’s time, and when it wore out, the replacement was walking around on four legs.

Number 16, the reed arrow. Reed shaft, because reed is straight, light,and free. The point was obsidian in the older examples and iron in the later ones. Often scavenged from the very people they were fighting.  The shaft was winged with three strips of feather.

 An Apache archer could put arrows into the air in fast succession. And at the ranges these fights were decided, that mattered more than muzzle energy. But here is what gets skipped. The arrow makes no sound leaving the bow and no smoke on arrival. A rifle does both and draws a line straight back to the man who fired it.

 The arrow tells the enemy nothing except  that somebody is already gone. Number 15, the buckskin quiver. It hung from the left shoulder on a simple strap, which meant arrows were drawn and loosed with the right hand. Chiricahua and Lipan men often cut the hair short on the left side of the head, level with the top of the ear, and wore the long braid over the right shoulder instead.

 The reason was purely mechanical. Hair on that side fouled the strap and fouled the bow arm. The weapon reshaped the haircut. And think about what that quiver was. A complete ammunition system, reloadable in the field, made from a deer that had already been eaten. It weighed almost nothing. The army moved its ammunition by mule train.

 The Apache wore his over one shoulder. Number 14, the fire drill. Two pieces of shaped wood. That is the entire device. You spin one against the other until friction gives you an ember, and you feed that ember into tinder gathered on the way past. It appears on the standard descriptions of what an Apache warrior carried on a raid, alongside a rope, a blanket, a water jar, and rations of mescal or dried meat.

That list is remarkably short. No cook kit, no tent, no stove, no fuel. A soldier in that desert could not make fire without matches shipped from a depot hundreds of miles behind him. When the matches ran out, the soldier waited on a wagon. The Apache picked up two sticks. Step back and look at the arithmetic of the chase itself.

Captain Henry Lawton rode out of Fort Huachuca on the 1st of April, 1886,  under orders to bring Geronimo in dead or alive. He took B troop of the 4th Cavalry, two supply trains, and 30 scouts. Accounts of that column describe men under loads of around 400 lb making roughly 20 miles a day toward the Mexican border.

The people they were chasing were covering 50 miles in that same day. Sometimes more. That gap is not a story about fitness. It is a story about weight. The army’s greatest strength anywhere in the world was its supply chain,  and in that country the supply chain was an anchor.

 The army carried more and lost ground every day because of it. Back to the countdown. Number 13, the rope. Twisted from raw hide or from hair, coiled at the waist, and it did a dozen jobs. It brought down stock. It let a man off a ledge no horse could approach. It bound a load, a captive, a bundle of hides.

 Nothing exotic about a rope, and that is the point. The army in Arizona Territory needed a quartermaster, a requisition, a wagon, and a road to deliver the same object. Somewhere along the way that rope turned into paperwork.  One second, then I’ll let you get on. Every gun in this book belonged to somebody doing a job, a trail cook, a school teacher, somebody’s grandfather.

And if one of them ended up in your family, there’s a chapter on what it’s worth before you ever think about selling it. 120 guns, 12 American trades, links in the description if you’d like a copy. Now, where were we? Back to the video. The Apache wore his. It cost him nothing to make and nothing to replace, and it never once slowed him down.

Number 12, the Izze cloth. The medicine cord, strands of hide, often four, each dyed a different color, commonly yellow, blue, white, and black, punctuated with beads and shell, and frequently paired with a pouch of pollen. 19th century ethnologists who tried to document it kept hitting the same wall. They recorded that the Apache held these cords so sacred that outsiders were not permitted to see them, much less handle or discuss them.

Much of what those reports contain is an admission of what the writer was never shown. A soldier could take that cord off a body. He could not take what it meant because nobody was ever going to explain it to him. Number 11, the novice kit. In the ethnographic accounts, when a young man was accepted onto his first raid, a war shaman handed him three things: a drinking tube, a scratcher, and a war cap that, unlike the cap of a proven warrior, carried no power of its own yet.

For four raids, he lived under that instruction. He was not there to fight.    He was there to watch, to carry, and to learn the country in his feet.    The Apache did not recruit soldiers. They grew them from boyhood inside the exact landscape those men would later have to disappear into.

The army shipped young men out from Ohio and handed them a rifle and a map. One system produced strangers with equipment. The other produced natives with 20 years of terrain knowledge before their first fight. Number 10, the knife in the moccasin cuff. Apache knives traveled in raw hide sheaths, often tucked under a belt.

But there was a better place, and it was already being worn. The long Apache moccasin ran up the leg, high enough in some examples to reach the thigh, and folded back down below the knee. That fold created a pocket,    and early descriptions of the Chiricahua record what went into it.

 Paints and a knife. The most important cutting tool a man owned rode in a pocket that was not manufactured, not purchased,  not carried. The army issued a sheath. The Apache folded his boot. Number nine, the mescal ration and the dry cache. This is the one I promised you at the top. Roasted agave called mescal and dried meat.

 That is what went out on a raid, but the ration in the pouch is only half the system. Apache bands moving between water sources used dry food caches. Supplies placed in advance along routes they expected to travel, salted through the country like a private network. The army’s food followed the army. It came up on mules and in wagons,    and the faster the column moved, the further behind its own dinner it got, until it had to stop and wait.

The Apache’s food did not follow him anywhere. It was already sitting at the far end of a march he had planned before he set out. Number eight, the blackened weapon. They darkened their weapons deliberately  to kill the shine. It comes up repeatedly in descriptions of how they fought, and anyone who has spent time in open desert understands why.

A flash off polished metal, off a buckle, off  a sweating face marks your position to an observer miles away. Reflection is the loudest thing in a desert.  So, one column crossed Arizona territory with brass fittings, polished carbines, canvas-topped wagons, and a dust plume visible from the next range over.

The other could not be seen  at 50 yd. The Apache did not have better optics. He simply refused to be a light source. Before the top seven,  one campaign because it is the clearest proof of everything on this list. Summer of 1881, a cheery Kaawa war leader named Nana, roughly 75 by most accounts  and possibly older, lame in one leg and his eyesight failing, took fewer than 40 warriors into the field.

Over the following 2 months, that band covered more than 1,000 mi through New Mexico territory, and some accounts put it far higher. They won a string of engagements against cavalry, took horses and mules by the hundred,  and eluded a pursuit of well over a thousand soldiers plus hundreds of Apache scouts.

When it was over, the pursuing force had not recovered a single Apache body. An old man on one good leg, carrying almost nothing, ran two national armies into the ground. Back to the list. Number seven, the horse. This requires unlearning something. The Apache did not build a horse culture the way the plains nations did.

 Their country did not reward it. Horses were used on large raids, but a warrior was just as likely on foot because on foot he could use ground no mounted man could follow him into. So, the horse changed jobs. To the cavalry, it was the machine. You fed it, watered it, shot it, rested it, and organized the campaign around keeping it alive.

To the Apache, it was a battery. You spent it. You rode it until it was finished, and then it stopped being transport  and became meat. One side had to protect its animals. The other could consume them. Number six,    the Winchester Model 1873 Carbine. In March of 1886, the  Tombstone photographer C.S.

 Fly traveled with General Crook to Canyon de los Embudos in Sonora and photographed the band before the surrender talks. Those images are among the most valuable ever made in the American West because in them you can count the weapons. Two Model 1873 Winchester  Carbines are visible in that group. Repeating rifles, metallic cartridges, the finest lever action on the continent.

 They came from raids, from ambushes on soldiers and miners and ranchers, from battlefields after the shooting stopped, from captured  pack mules, and from illicit trade. And here is the thing. The best rifle in North America did not solve the army’s problem, and it did not solve theirs, either. Because the problem was never the gun.

Number five, the Springfield Model 1873. The Trapdoor. This is Geronimo’s rifle. In the Fly photographs, he holds an 1873 Springfield in the long rifle configuration, the version soldiers called the long Tom. In other images, he appears with the shorter  Trapdoor Carbine. He was, by every account of the men who faced him, a superb marksman.

   Mexican records describe him pinning down a force from concealment and dropping men  with head shots at distance. Now understand why that particular rifle. The Trapdoor was the standard United States Army arm. It fired the .45-70 government cartridge, which meant its ammunition was the easiest in the Southwest to capture.

It was the round falling off dead soldiers and coming out of overrun ammunition mules. Choice of rifle among the fugitive bands was driven far less by preference than by what could actually be fed. Ulzana’s raid was conducted in part specifically to secure ammunition. So, consider what that means. They let the army haul their ammunition into the field for them, hundreds of miles on government mules.

Then they took it. The army carried more, and some of what it carried was resupply for the people it was hunting. Number four, the tus. Water is the whole problem of that country, and the tus is the Apache answer. It starts as a basket, woven tight from willow, cottonwood, or sumac, then sealed inside and out with pitch from the pinyon pine, and finished by rubbing the exterior with juniper and red ochre.

What you get is a vessel that holds water, weighs almost nothing, and is very hard to break. Drop a clay jar on rock out there, and you have a problem you cannot solve. Drop a tus, and you pick it up. Many were fitted with bentwood handles and a rawhide strap. That object is why a family could cross ground the cavalry could not enter.

The army’s water moved in barrels, on wagons, on roads, at the speed of the worst terrain on the route. Apache water moved at the speed of a walking human being, and it could go up a canyon wall. The army needed a road to carry water. The Apache needed a strap. Number three, the BOW. Short, roughly 50 to 60 in, cut from a single stave and strung with sinew or rawhide.

Built for close range,    for fast shooting, for a man lying in cover. And I want to be direct about it outranks two of the finest rifles ever made. A rifle is a confession. It makes a report that carries for miles across still air. It throws  a cloud of white smoke that hangs exactly where you are lying, and it draws every barrel in the country straight back  to your position.

Fire a rifle from ambush, and you have traded your concealment for one shot.    The bow costs you none of that. No sound, no smoke, no flash, no signature whatsoever.    You can empty a saddle, and the men riding beside it will not know which way to face. Everything about the way the Apache fought depended on not being  locatable.

The rifle broke that. The bow never did. One more step outside the list, and this one is about the army. General Nelson Miles understood that his real problem was information.    He could not find people who left no trail and made no noise. So, he strung roughly 30 heliograph stations across the territory.

Sun-powered mirrors flashing coded messages from peak to peak at the speed of light. One of the most advanced communication systems on Earth in 1886,    built by the richest army in the hemisphere to catch a few dozen people who owned nothing. It still took 15 months. Two to go. Number two, the moccasin.

  The construction is genuinely sophisticated. The sole is molded from half-tanned bull neck hide, the toughest leather on the animal. Rising off it is a stovepipe upper of soft garment leather running up the leg, in some examples to around 22 in. {inches} And then the detail that tells you everything.    The sole is stitched to the upper from the inside.

The seam is turned inward, where the ground cannot reach it, because a seam stitched on the outside gets cut open by stone. And a man whose footwear fails in that country is  finished. There is also the upturned toe, the cactus kicker. It is popularly explained as protection against rock and cactus spine, though specialists including Ferg and Kessel consider that improbable, so treat it as an open question.

What is not an open question is performance. The army issued boots manufactured in the East, sized by contract,  worn by men making 20 mi a day. The Apache wore a hand-built, seam-protected, thigh-high desert boot  that doubled as a knife sheath and covered 50. The army issued footwear. The Apache wore the ground.

Number one, the mouthful of water. Here is how it worked.    A boy went down to the stream, filled his mouth with water, and ran. Up a hill to the top of the nearest high ground and back, sometimes for miles. And the whole way he was not permitted to swallow. At the end, he spat the water out at the feet of the man training him.

 As proof that he had breathed through his nose the entire distance    and never once opened his mouth to gasp. Do that from childhood in thin, dry desert air and you build lungs no adult  training will ever hand you. It also solved a hard practical problem. A man panting through an open mouth in that climate  dries his throat out in minutes.

A man breathing through his nose does not. Now, hear it from the other side. Lieutenant John Bourke rode with General  Crook through those campaigns and wrote it down. 75 mi in a day, he recorded, was nothing unusual for them when pursued. And their method was to string  three or four such marches back-to-back in the certainty of wearing out the most energetic opponent sent after them.

Crook described their condition in two  words. Perfect physical condition. That is the entire list. Every object before this one was an accessory to this, and it is the only weapon in the Southwest the army could not answer    because it was the only one that could not be captured, confiscated, bought, or shipped west on a railroad.

 They could take his rifle. They could burn his camp.  They could take his horses, his water jar, his food. They could not take his lungs. Go back to where we started. 5,000 American soldiers, 3,000 Mexican troops, 500 Apache scouts, 15 months against 38  people. Now look down that list and notice what is missing.

 Not one item required a factory, a contract, a depot, a railhead, or a road. Every single thing on it could be made, replaced, or repaired by the person carrying it in  the country he was standing in. When Geronimo surrendered at Skeleton Canyon on the 4th of September, 1886,  it was not because the army out fought him or out marched him.

 It was because his people were down to a few dozen exhausted human beings, and there was nowhere left in two countries to lie down. The army never did learn to carry less. It simply outlasted the last people who could. So tell me in the comments one item off this list and you cross that  country on foot in 1886. Which one are you taking? Subscribe  and I will see you on the next one.